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Last week, I was talking about maintenance on ecommerce sites and a comment came up saying that selling on social media or on platforms like Etsy was much better than bothering with a whole website—it’s cheaper, easier, and just makes more sense.
Does it?
Once I got thinking about it, I decided that this is definitely something I had to write a blog post about.
There are definitely upsides and downsides to both options;
In this post, I’ll do my best to lay out the pros and cons of both of these.
First, we’re going to start with building your own ecommerce store, with your own design, branding and domain.
One big upside you get when you sell through your website, is that you have full control over it.
You don’t have to be constrained by whatever platform you are using. You don’t have to rely on it to keep your products up and working, and you can do whatever you want.
This gives you full control over the entire website and process. You can control how it looks, how everything is arranged, the branding, and the arrangement and structure.
You really have space to experiment and make your online store unique to you and become far more memorable to everyone that visits you. You can improve on your website flow to get more clients to the sales finish line and generally improve your branding and the way people remember you.
If you have your own site, you don’t have to deal with the fees that are put on you for selling in ecommerce marketplaces. The platforms that give you a place to sell your products are businesses. Their goal is, understandably, to earn money, and they do that partly by charging you for using their platform.
However, it can get a little tiresome to have to give out part of the money you earn from your products every time. You don’t have to pay this on your own platform.
Having your own platform also allows you to collect more detailed analytics on how many visitors come to your shop, when they are visiting, what they are doing, where they are going, and for how long they are staying in each place.
Information like this can be very helpful in getting rid of obstacles stopping your clients from buying and making your sales funnel flow even smoother. On third party marketplaces, you can’t really get the same level of insight.
Although you don’t have to pay sales fees, starting costs are definitely a lot larger for ecommerce sites.
You have to pay (sometimes very significant) fees for designing and developing the website, the hosting, domain, and all the technology necessary for making your website run smoothly.
Having full control over your shop does come with its downsides too. Although you are free to do whatever you want there, you are also responsible for keeping it working smoothly and keeping everything up to date.
NOTE: The other day I wrote a guide to doing website maintenance. Check it out!
If something goes wrong or your clients suddenly find that the checkout page keeps glitching, it will be your responsibility to have it fixed.
Now you know how everything stands with your own online store, but what about using a third party marketplace? Let’s have a quick rundown of the pros and cons on that!
You don’t have as much space to make your own brand stand out, but you can take advantage of the platform's existing audience and recognition. If you sell t-shirts on Etsy, people will already have some measure of trust in you (even if not a lot) and will assume that you are a real business selling more or less what you are offering.
If you are selling through your own website, you have to do the heavy lifting of driving traffic to your store and convincing people that you are trustworthy.
Selling through a platform also has very low starting costs. Often, you can just start to sell right away and have your sales fees increase only as you start to sell more, whereas to build an online store, you will have to throw down thousands right in the beginning.
If you sell through a platform, you will have to continually pay sales fees, which will only get bigger the more things you sell. At some point, this can start to leech away quite a bit of your profit.
One thing that you really miss out on when selling through ecommerce marketplaces, is the opportunity to build and establish your own brand. As long as you stay in those marketplaces, you are just another carton of milk in the supermarket, mainly judged on whether your price is lower than the others’.
On the other hand, if you build your own brand and really stand out, people will flock to you just because you are you and will be ready to pay a lot more.
You do not have that many opportunities for customization when selling through a platform. You have to bend your business into the shape of the platform and cannot go much further than that.
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There are definitely upsides to both selling through a platform and building your own shop; it’s up to you which one you choose.
Different things are right for different people. If you’re just starting out, or you just have a casual side-hustle, then selling through a marketplace is more than enough.
But if you are more serious about building your business, or want to grow beyond where you are now, it will likely be better to break off and build your own brand and online shop.
It all depends on where exactly you are, and where you want to go.
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